I love Super Bowl parties.  As a sports fan, I recognize that the Super Bowl is way overhyped as a sporting event, and that some real sports fans hate Super Bowl parties because they take away from the actual game, but I love them.  I love the wagering, the chicken wings, the commercials, the whole thing.

So I’ve had Super Bowl parties at my place virtually every year for the past decade or so.  I can’t remember what year I started doing it, but it was largely because I got tired of casting about for a place to watch the game and just decided it would be better to bring the party to me.  And when we rebuilt our apartment so that we had a lot more space, along with a rooftop penthouse room with a flatscreen and outdoor space, the parties just got bigger, to the point that it became an annual bacchanal with probably 40-50 people.

So when I moved to the suburbs, I was adamant that I would continue to have the party, particularly because my new condo is an even better venue, particularly with a 90 inch projection tv in the family room.  I also realized that I could set up a secondary projector through Slingbox and broadcast the game in the living room, which for some ungodly reason has no actual TV, which would give me another 75 or so inches of gorgeous TV football goodness.

That said, I had two big problems.  First, I didn’t actually have the projector installed yet.  The people who sold us the condo had put in a state-of-the-art audio visual system in the condo, but it was state0of-the-art circa 2002.  And if you’ve been paying attention for the past decade or so, that state has changed just a little bit in that time.  So the projector they installed was the size of a suitcase, and probably cost as much when they bought it as a suitcase filled with gold bars, but it was completely inadequate for my needs.  And, of course, as a devoted procrastinator, I didn’t get around to actually figuring out how to replace it until about two weeks before the Super Bowl, which ultimately necessitated an enormously rushed and expensive job to get a new one installed and set up to work on the ridiculously elaborate system that’s set up in the condo.  But we did it.

The second problem was, of course, that no one who came to my old Super Bowl party in the city particularly wanted to come to my new Super Bowl party in the suburbs.  Getting people to leave the city to visit you in the suburbs is hard enough, getting them to leave the city on a Sunday when they can watch the Super Bowl at a million good bars is even harder.  So I did everything I could to make it easy, luring them with promises of homemade lasagna (promise fulfilled) and homemade ice cream (sadly, promise broken), and arranging for pickups at the Tarrytown train station so they could get an easy back and forth.

Amazingly, I got a good crew coming out from the city.  More interestingly, I was surprised to realize just how many of my annual Super Bowl party crew has actually moved out of the city in the past few years. It never occurred to me when I held the party in the city how many people were driving into it.  So maybe half the people who were habitual invitees actually had an easier trip than they used to have.  Which was great.

It’s one of the things that sneaks up on you.  When you leave the city, you think you’re leaving all your friends behind.  But your friends are getting older too, and what you find is that a lot of them are already gone, or on their way.

So our first suburban party was a pretty good success.  The one great wrinkle we had this year was that we made up a board with those boxes (the ones where people put in a few bucks to buy a box, and then you assign numbers for the team scores for each quarter) on one of the walls in the living room.  We haven’t painted the place yet, so I got a special dispensation from the wife to make up the board on the actual wall, using tape to mark off the boxes and giving everyone a piece of paper so they could stick it right on the wall.  Much better than cardboard!